July 2012
70 posts
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At the Point reviewed in Jacket2:
A review of my latest, At the Point, is now up on Jacket2. Thanks to David James Miller for the close attention.
"Massey's vocabulary actively engages the landscape as the poems move back and forth from the natural to the urban scene. He knows words and uses their qualities to create the crisp recognitions of the poems. It's in those recognitions that we hear the voices of other poets—Bronk, Corman, and Samperi—who have taught Massey how to make singular observations of things into philosophical insights of being, revealing moments, fractures, of awareness that sharpen Massey's sense of self. Massey's work, certainly owing to these previous masters, equals theirs and even sometimes surpasses them. He has taken the similar but differently focused masters and on one hand honed the softer metaphysical edges of, say, Corman (whose words have a knife-edge but with a soft color) and Samperi, with the more arduous music of Zukofsky." →
oysterboyreview.org
A review of my first full-scale book, Areas of Fog, appears in the new issue of Oyster Boy Review.
KEROUAC KARAOKE →
hcl.harvard.edu
“Home Recording from the Late 1960s now available on the Poetry Room Listening Booth
“The Woodberry Poetry Room is proud to announce the digitization of a recording by Jack Kerouac made during a period (1967-1969) in which he spent long stretches of time cooped up at home. Kerouac often recorded himself improvising along to the radio—alternately singing, humming and whooping to such tunes as Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ and even performing his own colorful a capella rendition of ‘Alouette.’ This recording also features a recitation of snatches of Lorca’s ‘Romance Sonambulo’.
“Special thanks to John Sampas, for his permission to make this recording availalbe. The tapes came to Harvard through the estate of John Montgomery (the Berkeley librarian who figures as Henry Morley in THE DHARMA BUMS).”
John Clare, the poet of the environmental crisis – 200 years ago →
guardian.co.uk
“The land around Helpston, just to the north of Peterborough in Northamptonshire, now ranks among the most dismal and regularised tracts of countryside in Europe. But when the poet John Clare was born this coming Friday in 1793, it swarmed with life. Clare describes species whose presence there is almost unimaginable today. Corncrakes hid among the crops, ravens nested in a giant oak, nightjars circled the heath, the meadows sparkled with glow worms. Wrynecks still bred in old woodpecker holes. In the woods and brakes the last wildcats clung on….”
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